Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: That Never-Ending Battle
- 1 The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History
- 2 The Sciences of History
- 3 Controversial Boys
- 4 Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- 5 History from Nowhere
- 6 Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- 7 The Death of the Historian
- Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: That Never-Ending Battle
- 1 The Enlarging Horizon: Henry Thomas Buckle's Science of History
- 2 The Sciences of History
- 3 Controversial Boys
- 4 Discipline and Disease; or, the Boundary Work of Scientific History
- 5 History from Nowhere
- 6 Broad Shadows and Little Histories
- 7 The Death of the Historian
- Epilogue: Froude's Revenge
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I am beginning to think that this General Reader is after all, not quite such a fool…
Edward A. Freeman to James Bryce, 24 August 1873The combination of readableness and research is so difficult as to be almost impossible…
Mandell Creighton to W. E. Gladstone, 15 February 1887The establishment of the English Historical Review, the Cambridge Modern History, and even a few well-researched scholarly monographs held out the hope and promise that an inductive science of history would become the rule rather than the exception, that histories from nowhere would essentially be everywhere. The reality of history publishing was far from this ideal, however. Scientific historians may have wanted to present the past in all its reality, but publishing such work was the only way to communicate the historian's findings and this left historians largely at the mercy of publishers who were themselves dependent on a readership not necessarily interested in scientific standards. For historians who were supposed to let the past speak for itself, much of their work relied on just the style they condemned in others and was directed specifically at the readers who would have had little interest in reading good scientific history. As much as the Rankean historians expressed a desire to create a normative world where their work would be read and judged by peers alone, they were still very much public figures who wanted their views concerning history to be both widely disseminated and appreciated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Science of History in Victorian BritainMaking the Past Speak, pp. 115 - 132Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014